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Bulldozers and backhoes have essentially destroyed one of Belize's largest Mayan pyramids, which survived millennia of storms, rain and wind only to succumb to a construction company seeking gravel for road fill. The head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology says the destruction was detected late last week, and only a small portion of the center of the pyramid mound was left standing, according to the Associated Press. 7Newsbelize.com, the website for TV channel 7 in the small Caribbean country, accompanied a handful of archaeologists to the site recent.

A pyramid at the Maya city of Kiuic in Yucatan Peninsula started out as a ceremonial platform in 700 B.C., much earlier than previously thought, according to George Bey of Millsaps College. Many scholars think that the Maya collapse was caused by long-term drought and the depletion of natural resources, but Kiuic seems to have been abandoned rapidly around 880 A.D. Bey and Tomas Gallareta Negron of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History have found evidence that the residents left behind their grinding stones and other valuable kitchen tools, along with the remains of ancestors. “These were the Maya...

t is Dec. 20, 2012 — and citizens of Earth are panicking, consumed by the idea that the world will end Friday, something they say was predicted by Mayan astronomers. Of course, most people are not panicking, and Maya expert David Stuart says no one should. The calendar, he says, has plenty of room to go. In an interview airing on Thursday's Morning Edition, David Greene asks archaeologist Stuart, who helped translate influential ancient Mayan hieroglyphs in 1996, if he thinks the world will end on Dec. 21. "Absolutely not," is Stuart's answer, dashing the hopes of students eyeing a...

George Noory hosts. Tonight's topics: "Apocalipticism" and "End of the Mayan Calendar".

SAN DIEGO - With his gas mask on and machete in hand, Nikko Sanchez is ready for December 21. "It does possibly mean the end of the world," said Sanchez. "I do know about the Mayan calendar, I have done some research." The Mayan calendar only extends to December 21, 2012. Some people interpret that as a prediction for the end of the world on that date. "I've seen how horrific people can be when they really want to be," said Sanchez. Sanchez is a Gulf War veteran and he's ex-law enforcement. Now, he's a "prepper" -- prepared to survive...

Mike is on to something mighty interesting. Nowhere, and I mean nowhere, has anyone noted the corellation [sic] between the the two early Mayan “Baktun” transitions and spikes in ice core chemistry from Greenland. Calendrical genius that he is, Mike even reverse engineers the data and finds the Mayan calendar -- baring [sic] incredible coincidence -- serves to memorialize the two events -- as well as perpetuate a useful chime for the future. It is hard to grasp given his sparse abstract, but if I understand Mike correctly, he infers that the Maya calendar writer, long after the two extraordinary...

Ahead of December 21, which marks the conclusion of the 5,125-year "Long Count" Mayan calendar, panic buying of candles and essentials has been reported in China and Russia, along with an explosion in sales of survival shelters in America. In France believers were preparing to converge on a mountain where they believe aliens will rescue them. The precise manner of Armageddon remains vague, ranging from a catastrophic celestial collision between Earth and the mythical planet Nibiru, also known as Planet X, a disastrous crash with a comet, or the annihilation of civilisation by a giant solar storm. In America Ron...

Evidence of the miserable life lived by the Maya during the Spanish conquest of the 16th century has emerged in an ancient settlement of Mexico's east coast, as archaeologists unearthed dozens of infant skeletons with signs of malnutrition and acute anemia. Found in the recently opened archaeological site of San Miguelito, in the middle of the hotel chain area of Quintana Roo, near Cancun, the human burials were excavated within 11 housing buildings dating to the Late Postclassic Mayan Period (1200 - 1550). Archaeologists of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) estimate that at least 30 burials belong...

During excavations of the royal Maya city of El Perú-Waka’ in northwestern Petén, Guatemala, an international team of archaeologists has discovered the tomb of Lady K’abel, one of the great queens of Classic Maya civilization.El Perú-Waka’, located approximately 75 km west of the famous city of Tikal, is an ancient Maya city in northwestern Petén, Guatemala. It was part of Classic Maya civilization (200-900 AD) in the southern lowlands and consists of nearly a square kilometer of plazas, palaces, temple pyramids and residences surrounded by many square kilometers of dispersed residences and temples. A small, carved alabaster jar found in...

Mexican experts entered for the first time a 1,500-year-old funerary chamber in Palenque believed to contain the remains of one of the first rulers of this Mayan city... K'uk Bahlam I, who came to power in 431 A.D. and founded the dynasty to which the famed Mayan ruler Pakal belonged. The royal tomb, discovered 13 years ago inside Temple 20 of this archaeological zone in the southern state of Chiapas, is at least two centuries older than the tomb of Pakal, discovered 50 years ago at the same site... "As for dates, we're looking at the birth of the Palenque...

Some 1,600 years ago, the Temple of the Night Sun was a blood-red beacon visible for miles and adorned with giant masks of the Maya sun god as a shark, blood drinker, and jaguar. Long since lost to the Guatemalan jungle, the temple is finally showing its faces to archaeologists, and revealing new clues about the rivalrous kingdoms of the Maya. Unlike the relatively centralized Aztec and Inca empires, the Maya civilization -- which spanned much of what are now Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico's Yucatán region (Maya map) -- was a loose aggregation of city-states. "This has been a growing...

Around 700 AD, Tikal had the largest dam built by the ancient Maya of Central America, used sand filtration to cleanse water entering reservoirs, a "switching station" that accommodated seasonal filling and release of water, and the deepest, rock-cut canal segment in the Maya lowlands. All this to support a population at Tikal of perhaps 60,000 to 80,000 inhabitants and an estimated population of five million in the overall Maya lowlands.

One of the greatest archaeological riddles—and one of the grossest academic omissions—of our time is the untold story of the parallel ruins left by two seemingly unrelated ancient civilizations: the ancient Mayans on one side of the Pacific Ocean and the ancient Balinese on the other. The mysterious and unexplained similarities in their architecture, iconography, and religion are so striking and profound that the Mayans and Balinese seem to have been twin civilizations—as if children of the same parent. Yet, incredibly, this mystery is not only being ignored by American scholars, it’s being suppressed. What does archaeology have to do...

The oldest-known version of the ancient Maya calendar has been discovered adorning a lavishly painted wall in the ruins of a city deep in the Guatemalan rainforest. The hieroglyphs, painted in black and red, along with a colorful mural of a king and his mysterious attendants, seem to have been a sort of handy reference chart for court scribes in A.D. 800 — the astronomers and mathematicians of their day. Contrary to popular myth, this calendar isn't a countdown to the end of the world in December 2012, the study researchers said.

An ancient Mayan skull stolen from Tibet by Nazis - said to have magical powers to enable humanity to survive the December 2012 apocalypse - has been dropped by a lab assistant in eastern Germany, chipping its chin. The volcanic rock skull, named Quauthemoc, was dropped - or, more eerily, may have fallen of its own accord - during a photo-shoot at a laboratory in the small town of Glauchau, Saxony. "It was probably put down somewhere a bit wobbly," an eye-witness told Bild newspaper. "Suddenly it crashed to the floor. A big piece broke off the chin. It's really...

The countdown to the apocalypse is on. We're one year away from Dec. 21, 2012, the date that the ancient Mayan Long Count calendar allegedly marked as the end of an era that would reset the date to zero and signal the end of humanity. But will it? There have been many end of times predictions over the years. Christian radio host Harold Camping faced widespread ridicule when his predictions that the world would end twice this year - on May 21, and then on Oct. 21 - failed to materialize. But in the flurry of doomsday predictions - there...

A year from today the world will come to an end, according to some who cite the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar as evidence of a Dec. 21, 2012, apocalypse. But both astronomers and experts on Mesoamerican history say the Mayan apocalypse is likely to be another in a long line of failed doomsdaysAccording to the Maya Long Count calendar, the winter solstice of 2012 — Dec. 21, 2012 —is the end of a b'ak'tun, a 144,000-day cycle that has repeated 12 times since the mythical Maya creation date. The b'ak'tun that will end in 2012 is the...

Recently news has surfaced that claims there was a huge miscalculation in transferring the Mayan long count calendar over to our Gregorian calendar, with out boring you to death, it apears to have something to do with the movements of venus, it all sounds nice till they get to the bottom line. No one knows what the date would be or if it has already come and gone, so if this is to be believed it literally means that the alignment has already taken place or may at anytime going forward, they claim the date of December 21 2012 is...

Balloon Boy's Father 'Wanted TV fame Before World Ends In 2012' Richard Heene, the man suspected of the alleged "balloon boy" hoax, was driven by a conviction that the world will come to a cataclysmic end in 2012, according to a friend. Nick Allen in Los Angeles 20 Oct 2009 Robert Thomas, who claims to have been a confidante and researcher for Mr Heene, has been interviewed by police. Mr Thomas's lawyer, Linda Lee, claimed: "Heene believes the world is going to end in 2012. Because of that he wanted to make money quickly, become rich enough to build a...

Signs are evident we are living in a spiritually prophetic age. Many have deep seated questions about our times and are frantically searching for answers wherever they can to find them. Intellectuals are turning to lost civilizations like the Mayans and the ambiguous predictions of Nostradamus to satisfy a need for truth. They’ve even dug up some of old Merlin’s psychic prophesies to learn what he said about the end of the world — we won’t repeat them here. Their conclusion after gathering all the prophetic material: All sources agree, the world will end in 2012. It can’t be a...

It seems like everyone has their own vision of the Apocalypse. For Christians, The End is synonymous with the Four Horsemen, the Rapture and the Anti-Christ. Environmentalists, meanwhile, fear climate change, melting polar ice caps and turbulent weather. For paranoid newshounds, if rogue states like Iran or North Korea don't trigger a nuclear war, then debt-wracked banks will soon lead to total societal collapse. Then there's Hollywood: aliens, meteors, earthquakes, malfunctioning uteri and Hitchcock's angry birds. While the Apocalypse-theme has essentially become a pop culture cliché, it remains endlessly fascinating. Case in point: the Christian-focused "Left Behind" books, which have...

Mayans couldn't even see their own End of Days MY prediction for the year 2012, which I am told begins tomorrow, is that the world will not end. This is despite the belief that the Mayan calendar says that it will. The calendar was devised 5,125 years ago by the Mayans of Central America, a people who never had the wit to invent the wheel, but it runs out on Dec. 21, 2012. The End of Days, so to speak. If, as some seers suggest, thats an accurate prediction, you have less than a year to get your affairs in...

Archaeological zone 9UN367 at Track Rock Gap, near Georgia’s highest mountain, Brasstown Bald, is a half mile (800 m) square and rises 700 feet (213 m) in elevation up a steep mountainside. Visible are at least 154 stone masonry walls for agricultural terraces, plus evidence of a sophisticated irrigation system and ruins of several other stone structures. Much more may be hidden underground. It is possibly the site of the fabled city of Yupaha, which Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto failed to find in 1540, and certainly one of the most important archaeological discoveries in recent times.

Mexico - The Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History have admitted that they have a second reference to the date 2012 as "end of the world" on a carved fragment found at an archaeological site in southern Mexico. Salt Lake Tribune reports that archaeologists have long acknowledged that reference to date 2012 as "end of the world" is found on a stone tablet from the Tortuguero site in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco. But on Thursday, the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History announced that there is what appears another reference to the same date in an...

Various Mayan scholars have attempted to debunk this reading, including Sven Gronemeyer of Australia’s La Trobe University, who has studied the Tortugero tablet in great detail. On Wednesday he presented his decoding of the inscription, suggesting that Bolon Yokte’s prophesied appearance on December 21, 2012, represents the start of a new era and not the end of days. Proponents of the apocalyptic interpretation have misunderstood the poorly preserved hieroglyphs, he said.

I have come across a piece which looks like a Mayan death mask, anyone know much about this type of possible artifact?

A University of Colorado Boulder-led team excavating a Maya village in El Salvador buried by a volcanic eruption 1,400 years ago has unexpectedly hit an ancient white road that appears to lead to and from the town, which was frozen in time by a blanket of ash. The road, known as a "sacbe," is roughly 6 feet across and is made from white volcanic ash from a previous eruption that was packed down and shored up along its edges by residents living there in roughly A.D. 600, said CU-Boulder Professor Payson Sheets, who discovered the buried village known as Ceren...

The skeleton of a Maya Queen - with her head mysteriously placed between two bowls - is just one of the treasures found in a 2,000-year-old rodent-infested tomb. Priceless jade gorgets, beads, and ceremonial knives were also discovered in the cavern - which was found underneath a younger 1,300-year-old tomb which also contained a body - in the Guatemalan ruins of Nakum. The two royal burials are the first to be discovered at the site, which was once a densely packed Maya centre.

Reeking of decay and packed with bowls of human fingers, a partly burned baby, and gem-studded teeth—among other artifacts—a newfound Maya king's tomb sounds like an overripe episode of Tales From the Crypt. But the tightly sealed, 1,600-year-old burial chamber, found under a jungle-covered Guatemalan pyramid, is as rich with archaeological gold as it is with oddities, say researchers who announced the discovery Friday. "This thing was like Fort Knox," said Brown University archaeologist Stephen Houston, who led the excavation in the ancient, overgrown Maya town of El Zotz. Alternating layers of flat stones and mud preserved human bones, wood...

A team of Mexican specialists discovered remnants of a 2,000-year-old Mayan palace at an archaeological site in the southeastern state of Chiapas. "The discovery constitutes the first architectural evidence of such an early occupation of the ancient Mayan cities of the Upper Usumacinta basin" in the Lacandona Jungle, the National Institute of Anthropology and History said in a statement Wednesday. The project's director, Luis Alberto Martos, said this new discovery was made in a sunken courtyard located in the northern part of the the Plan de Ayutla archaeological site and represents the first evidence of occupation of that area between...

For Palenque inhabitants, marine fossils were the convincing proof of the land being covered by the sea long time ago, and parting from this fact they created their idea of the origin of the world, declared archaeologist Martha Cuevas, responsible, with geologist Jesus Alvarado, of research conducted by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Ongoing for 3 years, the investigation is oriented to understand symbolism given by ancient Mayas to Prehistoric vestiges, specifically the 31 specimens found at the archaeological site. The INAH researcher mentioned that petrified rests have been...

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican archaeologists have found two 1,300-year-old limestone sculptures of captured Mayan warriors that they say could shed light on the alliances and wars among Mayan cities during the civilization's twilight. The life-size, elaborate sculptures of two warriors sitting cross-legged with hands tied behind their backs were found in May in the archaeological site of Tonina in southern Chiapas state along with two stone ballgame scoreboards. The 5-foot (1.5-meter) tall sculptures have hieroglyphic inscriptions on their loincloths and chest that say the warriors belonged to the city of Copan, archaeologist Juan Yadeun said in a news release...

A Mayan tomb closed to the world for 1,500 years has finally revealed some of its secrets as scientists snaked a tiny camera into a red-and-black painted burial chamber. The room, decorated with paintings of nine figures, also contains pottery, jade pieces and shell, archaeologists from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) reported Thursday (June 23). The tomb is located in Palenque, an expansive set of stone ruins in the Mexican state of Chiapas. According to the INAH, the tomb was discovered in 1999 under a building called Temple XX. But the stonework and location prevented exploration. By...

Scientists working at a Guatemalan archaeological site that's more than 1,400 years old have reported finding a hieroglyphic-covered stone panel that, they say, conclusively identifies the ancient settlement as the enigmatic Site Q, a Maya city about which researchers have long speculated. Yale University archaeologist Marcello Canuto found the well-preserved panel last April at a site called La Corona. "[The] writing on the panel opens up a new chapter in Maya history," says anthropologist David Freidel of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, codirector of the expedition. "This new panel provides the critical test for establishing that La Corona is Site...

Murder victims suggest female strength in ancient culture.Archaeologists have entered a long-sealed crypt in Guatemala to find an ancient murder scene. The tomb, in the ancient city of Waká, contains the remains of two women, one pregnant, arranged in a ritual tableau. Researchers say the young, wealthy women were probably slaughtered as part of a power struggle between Mayan cities. And that, they say, sheds new light on the role of women in the Mayan culture 1,600 years ago. "This tomb tells us that women were extremely powerful," says Dorie Reents-Budet, a Maya specialist who works for the Smithsonian Institution...

Just in time for the 2012 craze, CNN reports on a brand new massive Mayan pyramid discovery, including an amazing stone frieze showing the Maya sacred creation story, the Popol Vuh: World’s Largest Myran Pyramid Discovered VIDEO

EL MIRADOR, Guatemala (Reuters) - One of Guatemala's greatest ancient Mayan cities may have died out in a bloody battle atop a huge pyramid between a royal family and invaders from hundreds of miles away, archaeologists say. Researchers are carrying out DNA tests on blood samples from hundreds of spear tips and arrowheads dug up with bone fragments and smashed pottery at the summit of the El Tigre pyramid in the Mayan city of El Mirador, buried beneath jungle vegetation 8 km from Guatemala's border with Mexico. Many of the excavated blades are made of obsidian which the archaeologists have...

GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) – Archeologists have uncovered carved stucco panels depicting cosmic monsters, gods and serpents in Guatemala's northern jungle that are the oldest known depictions of a famous Mayan creation myth. The newly discovered panels, both 26 feet long and stacked on top of each other, were created around 300 BC and show scenes from the core Mayan mythology, the Popol Vuh. It took investigators three months to uncover the carvings while excavating El Mirador, the biggest ancient Mayan city in the world, the site's head researcher, Richard Hansen, said on Wednesday. The Maya built soaring temples and elaborate...

At the recent Society for American Archaeology meeting in Sacramento, California, archaeologist Michael Callaghan from the University of Texas presented his team's findings from the ancient site of K'o (now modern-day Guatemala) and what they believe to be the oldest known royal Mayan tomb. Excavating under a wealthy home, they discovered a lid leading to a tunnel of about 16 inches wide. Following the tunnel, they discovered a chultan, or storage chamber, where a burial was performed. Within this storage chamber they discovered a body they believe to have been a man in his fifties who was reasonably healthy when...

March 14, 2002 Archaeologists Find Mayan 'Masterpiece' in Guatemala By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD rchaeologists exploring deep in the rain forest of Guatemala have uncovered what they think is the earliest intact wall painting of the Maya civilization. A depiction of scenes from mythology and ritual, the 1,900-year-old mural is being hailed by experts as a masterpiece. Even though only part of the mural has been exposed so far, scholars said the scenes and portraits promised rare insights into the society and religion of the Maya. The paintings, dated about A.D. 100, are described as more extensive and better preserved than...

Now overgrown by jungle, the ancient site was once the thriving capital of the Maya civilization Had we been traveling overland, it would have taken two or three days to get from the end of the road at Carmelita to El Mirador: long hours of punishing heat and drenching rain, of mud and mosquitoes, and the possibility that the jungle novice in our party (that would be me, not the biologists turned photographers Christian Ziegler and Claudio Contreras) might step on a lethal fer-de-lance or do some witless city thing to provoke a jaguar or arouse the ire of the...

CIUDAD ARCE, El Salvador - El Salvador's Maya Indians on Sunday invoked the forces of nature in an ancient ritual to help US President Barack Obama - set to visit the Central American nation - make wise decisions. The ceremony for Obama was part of an annual equinox ritual held by members of the country's Maya community. "We beg the volcanoes, the mountains, and the grandmothers and grandfathers, to call on the energy of the sun to surround ... Obama as he makes decisions," an indigenous shaman named "Tata" Neto said. Five Maya priests, including Neto - also known as...

Both sculptural fragments were recovered in 1993 by archaeologist Arnoldo Gonzalez, from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) and were recently incorporated to the Northern Tableau at the Archaeological Site of Palenque, in the Mexican state of Chiapas. Epigraphist Guillermo Bernal Romero has interpreted the secondary text of the tableau, integrated by the pair of fragments salvaged. In a preliminary expression of the glyphs ordered in columns, the date that corresponds to September 9th 687 is mentioned, when Palenque forces broke into the city of Po' (Tonina) "by the work" of its ruler K'inich Kan B'ahlam, firstborn child...

Centuries before the first speakers and subwoofers, ancient Americans -- intentionally or not -- may have been turning buildings into giant sound amplifiers and distorters to enthrall or disorient audiences, archaeologists say. Temples at the ancient Maya city of Palenque (map) in central Mexico, for example, might have formed a kind of "unplugged" public-address system, projecting sound across great distances, according to a team led by archaeologist Francisca Zalaquett of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Zalaquett's team recently discovered that Palenque's Northern Group of public squares and temples -- built around roughly A.D. 600 -- is especially good at...

2012, Just Another Year It’s like Y2K all over again. People are making a fortune writing and talking about 2012. The movie 2012 was entertaining, if not largely implausible. Really, are you going to escape an exploding supervolcano? Or you can breeze through Apocalypse 2012 which is an entertaining book that looks into all of the cataclysms we are overdue for and those who peddle end time theories. In any case, this whole “the world is going to end in 2012” started with the Mayan calendar. The ancient Mayan calendar resets itself at the end of 2012. Technically it is...

Using new techniques and extensive excavations, researchers have found that the Maya coped with tough environmental conditions by developing ingenious methods to grow crops in wetland areas. "The work shows that this intensive agriculture is more complicated and on a par with these other areas of intellectual development," says Timothy Beach, a physical geographer at Georgetown University in Washington DC, who presented his findings on Wednesday at the Geological Society of America (GSA) meeting in Denver, Colorado. The Maya civilization, considered one of the most advanced ancient societies, lived in sprawling and densely populated pockets from the Yucatán Peninsula in...

For two weeks we had been tunnelling beneath the surface of the acropolis hill at the ancient Maya city of Waká in Guatemala's Petén rainforest. It was the spring of 2006, and we knew that under the surface of the acropolis was a virtual layer cake of earlier structures. The acropolis had been one of the city's enduring spiritual centers before it was abandoned around A.D. 820. A large pyramid and several buildings still stand there today.We were at the bottom of a shaft we had dug the previous spring, working our way up the stairs of a buried building...

Tonina Lords Mentioned in Inscriptions: Nicknamed "Reptile Head", he ruled near 514 AD: Apparently the name of a bird (Kohkaj?) is combined.K'inich? Sawan B'ahlam Yaxuun Tihl, nicknamed "Sotz' Choj", ruled near 568 AD.Chak B'alu'n Chaahk, died near 589 AD.K'inich B'ahlam Chapaht, ruled since 615 AD and was contemporary of K'inich Janaahb' Pakal, the famous Palenque lord.Yuhkno'm? Wahywal? , defeated and probably sacrificed by Palenque in 687 AD.K'inich B'aaknal Chaak, the most powerful lord of Tonina, was enthroned in 688 AD. He defeated Palenque and its allies in at least 3 military campaigns.K'inich Chuwaaj? K'ahk' used the title of "Young Prince"...

A well-preserved tomb believed to be the final resting place of an ancient Mayan king has been discovered in Guatemala, scientists announced last week. The 1,600-year-old tomb was discovered on May 29 beneath the El Diablo pyramid in the city of El Zotz. It is packed with of carvings, ceramics, textiles, and the bones of six children, who might have been sacrificed at the time of the king's death. However, much more work is needed before the scientists can piece together all the clues about the tomb's owner. "We still have a great deal of work to do," said Stephen...